Gàidheil is Gàidhealtachdan air an eadar-lìon

Bardic Visions in North Dakota

The song-poem by this Scottish Gaelic poet, Domhnall Aonghas Stiùbhart, who spent the latter part of his life in North Dakota, harkened back to the idyllic days of his youth in the Highlands. Like many of his contemporaries, his life’s path consisted of many stages of migration: he was born on the Isle of Skye in 1838, but his family moved to Prince Edward Island (Canada) in 1841. He went to work on the railroad as an adult and eventually settled in North Dakota, where he died in 1914.

Domhnall sent his poem to at least two different newspapers in 1909 (the Oban Times in Scotland and the Casket in Nova Scotia). It echoes the fitful course of his life, recounting in reverse the long journeys he had undertaken across land masses and oceans earlier in life. His text is, to a degree, a reflection of the ancient role of the poet in Gaelic tradition as seer: his mind’s eye traverses the trail home that his heart so much wants to follow. Like many other Gaelic poems expressing a strong attachment to ancestral territory and sense of place, the almost ritualistic enumeration of place names has a strong emotional power. (See Warriors of the Word, 89, 296-304.) These literary devices also feature prominently in another of his surviving song-poems (“Chì mi uam, uam, uam”).

Although Domhnall mentions the Scottish Lowlands (line 54) and names a few places on the Highland-Lowland boundary with names well established in Gaelic tradition (lines 53-6), the majority of the place names he mentions, and the places in which he imagines spending time, are in the Highlands. Gaels’ sense of belonging did not generally extend beyond the Highlands in any strong sense (see lines 24 and 60 in particular).

In his correspondence to the newspapers, he names his current place of residence as “Steuartdail,” which was known in English as “Stewartdale.” It was close to modern Bismark. I assume, but am not certain, that he coined the place name himself to signify his own homestead area. Did he knew any of the Gaels in Manitoba who threatened to move to the Dakotas, dissatisfied with the extreme difficulties they faced in railroad settlement schemes (see Seanchaidh na Coille, 170-5)?

It is perhaps ironic that, like so many of his contemporaries, he laments his exile from his kin and his family’s explusion from their ancestral home (lines 7 and 12), but at the same time defers to the supremacy of the British Empire, only seeking validation for his people as loyal warriors of that authority (lines 61-64). The vision of most Gaelic poets had become highly constrained by imperial conditioning (see discussion in Seanchaidh na Coille, 68-78, 187-9). At least his depiction of the native peoples of the area, the Sioux (line 18), is not overtly negative.

It is noteworthy that this song was modeled on an older Jacobite song. Jacobite songs provided a solid bedrock of song models for many Gaelic poets in North American immigrant communities and he even mentions Prince Charles by name (line 28), suggesting that the choice of this song model was a conscious one. Despite the catastrophic defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden and the symbolism of that battle in Gaelic tradition as the last independent act of defiance against a hostile, anglocentric state, songs of the Jacobite movement were firmly entrenched in the musical-poetic canon and provided the melodies and choruses (and notes of determination and defiance) used by many “New World” poets.

An informant of the School of Scottish Studies, Johanna MacDonald (1880-1973) of Smiorasairidh, Gleann Ùige, Mùideart / Moidart, sang a portion of this song to Calum Maclean in 1954. (Thanks to my friend Dr. Tiber Falzett for finding this recording and sending me the reference.) You can hear the recording online at this link.

This poem has never received any previous scholarly attention and a few of my interpretations of geographic references are tentative. I would welcome any alternative suggestions about these interpretations.

2 thoughts on “Bardic Visions in North Dakota”

Yes, a true highlander – but Stuart certainly also acknowledges some of his Lowland roots, the Isle of Bute being a primary Stewart property and center of the Clan Stuart. While we don’t know from his poem what branch of the family he was from, his reference to Bute and Rothesay certainly points to the Stuarts. Note also, your transcription of his North Dakota residence as “Steuartdail.” While you speculate that he may have been drawn to No Dak by other displaced Canadian Gaels, please know that the old “Northwest Territory” including Minnesota and the Dakotas had a strong representative population of Scottish immigrants, many, if not most, lowlanders. [Garrison Keillor and the Scandinavians notwithstanding!] My own family, from Hamilton Scotland, were pioneers in southern Minnesota at a time when the railroads had not extended into the territory opening up to settlement, and they walked alongside their oxcarts the 400 miles from eastern Wisconsin. They were accompanied by two other Scots families, the Cardles [Castle Douglas] and the Ogilvies [Arbroath], also lowlanders. Together they formed their own settlement out on the prairie on land not all that different from Stuart’s near Bismarck.

You bring up an interesting point, that of the relevance of Rothesay to someone whose surname is Stewart. Indeed, that seems very likely to be the reason he mentions the spot, as a point of connection to his clan.

I think you’re mistaken to think that his surname gave him some special sense of connection to Stuarts/Stewarts in the Lowlands or that he had any generally affinity to Lowlanders. There were major ethno-linguistic divides between Highlanders and Lowlanders, as the poem itself demonstrates. None of the other locations he mentions have any particular Stewart associations, but they are rather symbolically important to him as a Gael; they are all in the Highlands or on the H-L border; he names MacDonalds and MacLeods because of the imprint of their names on territories; and he specifically states his allegiance to Gaelic and Gaels (lines 24 and 60).

I did not speculate that “he may have been drawn to No Dak by other displaced Canadian Gaels”, I only wondered aloud if he knew any others, who may have come before or after he did. There were very strong networks between people as well as via Gaelic periodicals (to which he himself contributed). Lowlanders and Highlanders did not always mix well in immigrant communities — in fact, there was often a great deal of animosity between them. This is discussed, amongst other places, in my article “Scotland’s Two Solitudes Abroad: Scottish Gaelic Immigrant Identity in North America” at this link: https://www.academia.edu/979175/Scotlands_Two_Solitudes_Abroad_Scottish_Gaelic_Immigrant_Identity_in_North_America